Mother's Day 2016

I was looking for a simple yet unique gift for the students to make for Mother's Day. After creating a string art piece for our Ladies' Night Out fundraiser, I thought the students would like to create a string art on a smaller scale for their moms. My grade-level partner recently moved into a new house that has a barn on the property and in that barn...was a bunch of barn wood she was looking to get rid of. Lucky us!!!!! We cut the boards into 6 in x 6 in pieces and drilled holes to mark out where we would put the nails to make a heart shape. I was not brave this year and just pounded in the nails myself while watching one of our nightly shows. Before I started the project with students, I had lengths of yarn cut so that time would not be wasted and I could help students with their project rather than cut yarn. Before we started the string art, I had the students write a note to their moms on the back of the wood with a Sharpie marker. Some of them got really creative with a cute little poem and I am not talking about "Roses are red, violets are blue..." I personally tied the string to the first nail then had the students outline the heart with the yearn before filling in the middle. When they filled in the middle of the heart, they chose their own pattern. Some students chose to keep the yarn in a straight line pattern, some did a checker print, some strung the yarn so that it had the same ending point with every wrap they made, and some students just strung the yarn any which way they felt like. There is not a wrong way to do it, so that made this project desirable for young kids. I posted a pic of the finished project below. Overall, this was a very easy project to do with students and the moms LOVED it. The most time consuming part was marking and drilling the holes.

Young Entrepreneurs

We recently finished our economics unit in social studies. I had a lot of interested little entrepreneurs who craved information about the world of business and economics. We had a lot of fun with this unit and learned a ton! We learned about opportunity cost through ice cream and cake. We learned about human, natural, and capital resources through creating our own S'more business. We put all of our learning together in our business plan project in which the students developed a business plan from a big idea they had. (We might have the next Shark Tank finalist in our midst.)

We really liked the opportunity cost activity in our classroom. In all learning that we do, I try to relate what I am teaching students with real-life examples they understand. I was pretty sure that my students would understand ice cream and cake (I do!), so I used that as the examples in our opportunity cost activity. I am positive I had students engaged in learning with the mention of ice cream...and I am positive I had most students drooling by mentioning cake. For this lesson, I started with a share aloud to get the students thinking about choices they make in their daily lives even as kids. I asked the students that if they had to choose between spending a day with their family at the beach or going to the movie theater with friends, which would they choose and why? Amazingly, many students chose going to the beach with their family citing reasons such as spending family time together and having a picnic. (Insert awwww here) Then I followed with a close reading passage that introduced the idea of opportunity cost. Next we put our learning to the test by creating opportunity cost flip books. Students were asked to draw an illustration of ice cream and cake on the front of the flaps. Then they wrote the advantages and opportunity cost for choosing each item. These made me chuckle, so we had to share them in our small groups. Our group leaders made sure that everyone had a voice in the group and had a chance to share their flip books. I posted some pics of one of the flip books a student created. Our learning objectives were met with ice cream and cake! Who knew?!